ined his soul, and to avenge his victims by personating one
of them. In that personation he had haunted Boris as effectively as if
he had been the very ghost of the boy murdered at Uglich, haunted and
tortured, and finally broken him so that he died.

That was the part assigned him by Fate in the mysterious scheme of human
things. And that part being played, the rest mattered little. In the
nature of him and of his position it was impossible that his imposture
should be other than ephemeral.

III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA

An Episode of the Inquisition in Seville

Apprehension hung like a thundercloud over the city of Seville in those
early days of the year 1481. It had been growing since the previous
October, when the Cardinal of Spain and Frey Tomas de Torquemada,
acting jointly on behalf of the Sovereigns--Ferdinand and Isabella--had
appointed the first inquisitors for Castile, ordering them to set up a
Tribunal of the Faith in Seville, to deal with the apostatizing said to
be rampant among the New-Christians, or baptized Jews, who made up so
large a proportion of the population.

Among the many oppressive Spanish enactments against the Children
of Israel, it was prescribed that all should wear the distinguishing
circlet of red cloth on the shoulder of their gabardines; that they
should reside within the walled confines of their ghettos and never be
found beyond them after nightfall, and that they should not practice as
doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, or innkeepers. The desire to emancipate
themselves from these and other restrictions upon their commerce with
Christians and from the generally intolerable conditions of bondage
and ignominy imposed upon them, had driven many to accept baptism and
embrace Christianity.

But even such New-Christians as were sincere in their professions of
faith failed to find in this baptism the peace they sought. Bitter
racial hostility, though sometimes tempered, was never extinguished by
their conversion.

Hence the alarm with which they viewed the gloomy, funereal, sinister
pageant--the white-robed, black-mantled and hooded inquisitors, with
their attendant familiars and barefoot friars--headed by a Dominican
bearing the white Cross, which invaded the city of Seville one day
towards the end of December and took its way to the Convent of St. Paul,
there to establish the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The fear of the
New-Christians that they were to be the object of the